june, when dutiful young farmers tend to their gardens.

Last night we planted the garden.

It was the climax in a long process of preparation that I don't claim to have enjoyed very much. The garden at our house, once renowned for its ability to produce crops considered exotic in Endiang (i.e. watermelons and corn) was left to its own devices for far too many years. The once-loose soil had grown over and turned to sod. I can tell you quite firmly that little kubota rototillers have little effect on sod. Our 200 square foot garden was the result of many hours and countless sore backs spread over two years.

But when we finally had all the seeds in the ground and were able to look at our network of stakes and walkways it was hard not to feel a sense of pride.

Which, of course, I don't expect our neighbours to understand.

For some reason, farmyard gardens have become not as much a place to grow food for the table as a showcase for the owners' ability to make a perfectly straight row.

Our garden, on the other hand, does not possess any straight rows. None of the rows are even a little straight. Come to think of it, we didn't even try for rows - we simply marked off a plot for each crop, took a hand full of seeds each, and went at 'er. There are no right angles - the garden itself is a bit trapezoidal. Our paths meander around the individual crops, marked off by old survey stakes, so it looks as if a condo complex is soon to be built there.

But there's a certain satisfaction that you take from raising your own food that overrides the geometric layout of the garden.

I'm not sure how our garden will come up. It will take a lot of weeding, a bit of watering, and a miracle or two, but I hope that sometime later this summer I'll be able to write to you about how the potatoes are coming or how high the corn has gotten.

As yes, dear reader, you will be welcome to drop on by and share in the bounty.

Regards from Alberta's brush plain.

we're from the country and we like it that way (even if others don't)

Alberta, rural Alberta in particular, gets a pretty bad rap a lot of the time. Alberta: home to gun-totin', tory-votin', Jesus-lovin' rednecks.

Which isn't to say that we haven't earned the reputation - Albertans have a bad habit of acting a little ... back-woodsy, shall we say, when the world is looking. But it's become habit for the rest of Canada, when the heat is on, to turn and say "at least we're not Alberta."

In Alberta, of course, this has turned into something different; "Blame Alberta" has turned into "Blame the Rural-folk."

The rural areas, some would have you believe, are filled with inbred, cross-burning, bible-thumping, Conservative-loving, ignorant, ill-educated, seldom-washed, gap-toothed hicks. All rural people drive huge, polluting trucks with a gun-rack in the back, believe the earth to be 6000 years old and flat, and wait for the local preacher to tell them how to vote. Rural evenings are spent at bush-parties, book-burnings, and tent-meetings.

All evils can be directly related to the population of rural Alberta: homelessness is the result of country-folks right-wing attitudes; numerous Conservative majorities the result of rural ignorance; private health care the brain-child of greedy country-dwellers.

Rural areas are devoid of culture, the people illiterate, the towns and villages suspicious of outsiders.

When spending time in one of Alberta's urban centres, rural people must make a decision: completely renounce one's roots, or face ostracism by enlightened city-dwellers.

Reasonable people realize what a load of horse-turds statements like these are, but reasonable people can be hard to find in a pinch.

There certainly are many people in this neck-of-the-woods who do fit the stereotype, but many more live in the shining cities and all across Canada. Are we to believe that there are fewer Conservatives in Calgary and Edmonton than in the rest of the province? Can it possibly be true that there are fewer Creationists in the cities than out of them? Am I to believe that urban centres are not plagued by racism and prejudice?

When I was in university I spent an awful lot of breath defending my rural background and the baggage that comes with it. Many felt I must be relieved to have escaped the ignorant country-side. When I returned to the farm I suspect more than a couple of my friends questioned my actions: I suspect they're still waiting for me to come crawling back to the city.

The issue goes beyond personal annoyance, however. It seems that nine times out of ten the people who denounce the rural areas loudest are staunch supporters of Alberta's non-right parties. What rural Albertan would vote for someone who holds them in disdain? The Conservatives, for all thier faults, know that rural voters hold the balance of power and to win you need to court that vote.

Be ye warned, people of the left, change will not come without the rural vote.

Thus, dear reader, I complete my post. Regards from Alberta's brush plain.

you want to see dry? i'll show you dry!

As with farm communities everywhere, the big topic out on the brush plain this spring has been the weather.

That mythical 'average year' continues to elude us and every one's feeling the pinch - after several years of excessive rain, sodden fields, and cloudy days we've slipped back into the drought cycle - clear blue skies and never-ending wind that dries out your lips and carries the topsoil to Saskatchewan.

This has been a year of dust storms and fire bans. But we seem to missing something ... oh yeah, almost forgot, "Cue the locusts!"

Dear reader, if I seem to have been inconsistent with my posts lately, I apologize - when you take on the role of a farmer you tend to tie yourself a little more to the elements. "Make hay while the sun shines" applies equally well to spring seeding and fall harvesting. Clear sunny days mean the rush is on to put a crop in the ground.

I fully expect this summer is going to break my heart - if this weather pattern continues we can expect the grain to fail and the hay to be a wreck as well. But we'll get through it.

Because, as they say, there's always next year.

the thing we all need to learn a little (myself included)

http://www.ted.com/talks/joachim_de_posada_says_don_t_eat_the_marshmallow_yet.html

alright, who broke the school system?

I'll be completely and brutally honest with you. I don't like my job. I don't hate my job, but I certainly don't like it.

Let me explain something - I like teaching. I really like teaching. I like sitting down with kids and helping them puzzle through the challenges that face them daily. I like working with them while they learn to think for themselves and challenge the world around them. I love getting to open their minds to new possibilities.

But that's not what my job is. My job title is 'teacher,' but in essence my job is to transmit the values and culture dictated to me by the ministry of education. I am to come to work and do as I am told and I am judged by how well I play the game. I am an employee of the state: as such I am at the state's mercy.

The point is this: teachers, and by extension the public education system, are not judged on their abilities; they are not judged on how their students fare in the world; they are not judged on whether or not they have tried to improve the world. Teachers are judged on the quality of their classroom decorations; they are judged on how long they stay at school after work; they are judged on how much jargon they can use in a single sitting.

Education (and I would argue this goes doubly for public education) has little to do with bettering the world and improving the lives of our children. It has everything to do with appearances.

Teachers really do care. Schools are not inherently evil. The majority of people working in the system do so because they believe they are doing right. Their intentions are good, but the road to hell remains paved with good intentions.

My wife, who now works in a school, and I both came to the realisation at about the same time that schools are not a happy place. Nobody really wants to be there - teachers are, in large part, miserable and count the hours down. Some, like their students, spend their time counting down the days they're done. In Dante's inferno the school would have been located somewhere around the first circle of hell.

I'm young. I don't claim to have all the answers or be able to fix everything. But I'm not stupid. I can recognize when something is not working and public education is not working. It looks good. It gives the impression that something is being done without actually addressing the problems.

As for myself I'm going to go and teach some students. To hell with appearances.

Happy wednesday from Alberta's brush plain.

always look horses, gift or otherwise, in the mouth

Have you ever promised yourself that you would limit your actions? For example, "I'm only going to eat one piece of pie," or "I'm only going to pick a fight with one skinhead," and the next thing you know you're surrounded by empty pie tins and the entire Aryan Nation (Edmonton Chapter). That's sort of what our chicken adventure has turned into.

It doesn't help that the woman we buy our chickens from - our dealer, if you will - is a junkie herself. She just can't help it, she wants the whole world to experience the joy of poultry. You go to buy five chicks, you leave with seven and an order for turkeys.

I can think of far worse things that a person can overdo than acquiring poultry: I don't think that the seven new bantam chicks in our office are going to lead us into a life of crime.

Horse trading, on the other hand, might be a good gateway, if you will, to the criminal underbelly of agriculture.

Whilst returning from our chicken acquisitions we decided to drop in at the auction mart where we knew there was a horse sale taking place. I like horse sales: I understand horse people, their mistrust of other human beings; their strangely warped hats and manure crusted clothes - it's an atmosphere I'm comfortable in. But some of the claims made by horse traders would make a carny blush.

"This here is a gen-u-wine pure-bred thoroughbred mare! Papered and all! Let's start the bidding at five hunnerd!" When said beastie is trotted into the ring you behold a dirt encrusted little nag with a stringy mane and a touch of founder. The ancestry is more along the lines of zebra/shetland pony cross. It would cost at least five hundred to convince someone to take her off your hands.

But people bid - it's like a sickness. Horses trot into the ring, hands jump into the air, prices rise steadily and someone becomes the lucky new owner of thier very own hayburner.

Afterwards you hear everyone trying to justify it to themselves: "I figure I'll feed her up and make a good horse outta her" or " He's just gotta grow a little bit and then he'll clean up real good."

Which is why every other farmstead in Alberta has an unbreakable, unrideable, fleabitten equine living behind the barn.

"But Stu," you say, "how can you speak so harshly about those who just want to have a horse around the place? Don't you want the same thing?"

Too true, dear reader. Too true.

There's one thing has kept me honest so far - our stock trailer isn't road worthy and I don't relish the thought of paying a hefty fine when caught with my illegal rig.

But yes, I too sit there, my eyes glazed over, my hands twitching, trying my damndest not to bid for everything that comes into view; wondering if the auctioneer mistook that involuntary twitch as a bid (important lesson learned - do not take a talkative Italian with you to the auction market: it's liable to end in financial ruin).

It's true that I want to have a couple horses around the farm yard: Preferably rideable ones though - horses you can saddle up any day and not have to worry about filing a flight plan before hand.

Experience has taught me this - a few years ago my family bought a nice little mare at auction. "Broke an' all" they said, "this here's a real nice horse." And she was - a nice little palomino mare, friendly and clean.

When it came time to throw a saddle on her, though, her Jekyll and Hyde personality came out. Our nice little mare turned into a ball of tightly wound rubber bands, a ball of rubber bands that exploded when I hopped astride.

They say when you get bucked off you should just get back on again. Although generally good advice, a guy just sometimes has to admit he's beat. After a couple dozen trips through the air we decided to give the original owners a call.

Turns out she had been broke and ridden (about six years before) but had spent the past few years on pasture with her foals.

I had to go back to college the next week: me being the only one with the guts to climb up on her meant that, next horse sale, our nice little mare returned to the auction.

Who knows, perhaps some poor sod became the proud owner of a "former Kentucky derby winner" that day.

animal based musings

At a time when some people are concerned about swine flu, Kayla and I seem to have come down with chicken fever.

Having managed to sustain our little flock of chickens for a few months we've decided that it is high time to add a few more into the mix. Five more to be exact.

Of course, this means that we will, again, have chickens as our house quests. It also means that we will, again, have to deal with the late night cheeping, scratching, squawking, etc that comes with having such creatures as guests.

Truth be told, I really don't mind.

As this adventure continues we're learning that it's really nice to have lots of living things around. When the cats first came to live with us we were wary - neither of us are what you would call cat people, but pretty soon we were glad to have the extra bit of companionship. When the first batch of chickens arrived we both asked ourselves what we'd gotten into, but we quickly learned how much fun having little feathered monsters around can be.

I've always been an animal lover. When I lived in Edmonton I found the hardest part of it all was the lack of contact with dogs or cats. Now that I'm working in a school I find one of the frustrating aspects of the job is that I can't bring the dog with me (when I'm farming he usually rides with me in the tractor or truck). Animals really do make life easier to bear.

Of course, that means that I have to work pretty hard to restrain myself from bringing home every dog-to-a-good-home or elderly-horse-looking-for-retirement-pasture that I see or hear about - I could easily turn into that guy who drives around in a pickup with fifteen dogs riding in the back.

Maybe I need a change of work. They say that most people switch careers a good seven or eight times in their life; perhaps I should find one that allows dogs.

If you happen to come across a job listing advertising $50 000 a year and dogs permitted, let me know.

Who knows, maybe it would be fun to say I let my job go to the dogs.